Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
Perhaps Mailer coined the term to allow for the possibility that some of the items printed may happen to have been true....
Nonetheless, I doubt the researchers who collected the data the term was applied to in the book would appreciate their work being classed the same as the gossip pieces Mailer was referring to.
It's a good word. A lot of import. It's wrong to relegate it to just another synonym for fact.
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I've seen factoid used to imply trivia, i.e. something that is true and perhaps interesting, but not particularly important. I have also seen it used to mean something that is not actually true, but is repeated so much that most accept it as truth, for example, various quotes attributed to famous people that probably were not said by them. Fake news tends to imply something that either is known to be false, or can easily be shown as false, but it reported as truth.